The Stories You'll Tell
by The Sh33p
Summary: Gather round, gather round. An elder is spinning his tale...


**Disclaimer:** Apply a bit of suspension of disbelief before you go raving about how this or that is impossible in the lore. Other than that, enjoy.

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Azeroth is a planet suspiciously lacking when it comes to _...walk into a bar..._ jokes. If such things were abundant here, though, most of the more violent ones would undoubtedly end up centering on a cruddy little tavern called Deepwater, appropriately located close to the docks of Menethil Harbor. It's not particularly shady by any means. Just violent. You won't find the bitter fairy tales of Lion's Pride or the knives in the back of Broken Keel, and there are certainly a whole lot less heroes conveniently lurking in its shadows than you'll find in Goldshire.  
All you're likely to find on most nights is somebody else's teeth (and that's assuming you're thorough enough to check the rafters).  
But tonight's a little different from that. The Feast of Winter's Veil is in full swing, the brawlers have turned to a sense of almost disturbingly benign revelry (drunk as it is), and the old veterans have finally deigned to spend the night swapping war stories. You'll recognize the lot of them by look, if not by name. They're the same pack of old men and women who gather round stone fireplaces and roundtables in every universe, defined not by the names they wear or the stories they tell, but by the way they look and the fact that they tell stories at all. Some are bitter, and some are uplifting, and others have a kind of mystified tone to them. Gather round now, and listen to the transition of stories; of widows and widowers, saints and sinners, soldiers all and witnesses few.  
"...and when we were done," says the man with the ragged stomach-length beard and the gut you could catch cannonballs with. He's among the many who are just a little bit haunted by the stories they tell. "When we were done burning them outta the woods, I'll be damned if they didn't get right back up and..."  
"Yer spillin' ale an' drool on yerself," says the nurturing crone, who joined the crew of storytellers a couple dozen universes back. Her and about ten others like her, rotating in and out the same way the men do. She dabs at ol' Gutbeard and you can tell that their lives have probably cast them as husband and wife here.  
"It was depressing to listen to anyway," says the resident Professor. It's up to you if that one's a man or woman. You can tell it's the Professor simply because it's the only one speaking what you might recognize as Properly Sober English. "Anyone else have a story to tell?"  
"Ay do," says the one with a beard all the way to his shins. Fair enough, since it's a Dwarf and the beard in question only has to be about two feet long to pull that off. "'N ol' storeh from meh days with the League o' Arathor," the Dwarf continues, and he's got that mystified look and a big wooden mug that just foreshadows every single word he's about to say. Look at the way the firelights dance with the shadows in the nooks and crannies and wrinkles of his face. "Years 'n' years 'n' years back. Maybe all 'a way back t'when yeh weren't saggin' to the floor," he says to Nurse Crone, and completely ignores the cuff he gets on the back of the head for it. "But Ay still remember it like it was yesturdey..."

_"Hold the damn line!" the Mage screamed, though he was the only one actually fighting by then. Our narrator, the Dwarf, lay on his side nearby, being given his death rites by a Priest who'd lost an arm and didn't have much longer either. The peasantry huddled in the mill behind them, picks readied for what little good it'd do.  
"Rally, you fools!" the Mage screamed again, though the madness in his eyes left one wondering if he was even bothering to talk to anyone at all now. His hands lashed out in time; a fireball cast with one, and then a frostbolt with another. A Warrior fell at his feet, and then an oversized cougar staggered and bled on under a thin layer of sharply cracked ice. Not far away, a Hunter brought her rifle to bear with a glowing green eye narrowed for aim -- and then she was a sheep, meandering along with the thoughts sheep think. By this point, the Mage was laughing. Hands high overhead, and bolts of arcane energy shot from every fingertip in gatling fashion. They curved sharply, arced around their caster, and then sped into the night with a different target for each. Another Warrior stumbled under the first impact, and then was bashed aside by silent charge of a Voidwalker. One or two bolts hit this one too, and did little good.  
Without regard for gravity or the inclination of terrain, the Voidwalker sped uphill and kicked pounds of dust and dirt up in its wake. The air chilled around it, and its mannacles left the air frosty blue as it closed in--  
"Burn," the Mage shrilled, and there was a flash of orange at the thing's very core. If it had legs, it might've staggered. "Burn!" the Mage ordered again, and this time there was a harsher burst of orange to accompany it. The Voidwalker didn't stop. "BURN!" the Mage screamed--  
And the Voidwalker smashed his face bloody with one ill defined fist before he could get the next spell off. He was still laughing as he spun down to his knees, and the Voidwalker arced about as wide as the pass would allow. A Warrior charged into the opening, accompanied at long last by the Voidwalker's controlling Warlock. A wounded Shaman hobbled after them, wreaking of wet cat and blood.  
"FOR THE HORDE!" someone shouted, and our narrator truly thought he was going to die. The Priest at his side coughed blood and the life tapered from his eyes in mid-prayer...  
...the Warrior leapt high, the Voidwalker came in low...  
...and they were stopped.  
In less time than it'd take to blink, our narrator lives to say some other day, the Warrior was shoulderchecked across the hip and sent tumbling to an ugly landing nearby. The Mage was shoved aside by the broad end of a two-handed axe, and a Word was shouted with an outstretched hand. The Voidwalker simply popped out of existence with a foul spray of purple ectoplasm in every direction, none of it lasting long enough to hit the ground before it all turned to vapor and faded out. Here, the details become a bit sketchy. They always do, when the blood simply vaporizes from someone's face, and all your injuries are undone, and the corpse beside you is suddenly sitting upright with a manic smile and a brand new, completely uninjured arm.  
"RALLY!" said the stranger, and our narrator will never forget him. He was a tall man, almost eye-level with a Night Elf. Broad of shoulder and chest, with pitch black hair in an unknightly crewcut and a short beard to match. He wore red and gold, and all of it battleforged and veiled in the glories of Light. A Tome was chained to his belt, a long cape flowed at his back, and the axe in his hands was almost as long as the man himself was tall. Both its blades gleamed red and gold, even after he brought it down into the head and chest of the fallen Warrior.  
Holiness, the narrator later mumbles, doesn't equate mercy.  
"FOR KINGS! FOR COUNTRIES! FOR HONOR AND LIGHT!"  
The Paladin turned now, his axe swinging with an aura of power and command. A great, blood-soaked wolf fell upon its edge and hit the ground a few yards away, rent in half from jaw to stomach. The Warlock pressed forward, casting an aura of fear even as he weaved the incantations to bring another demon into the world--  
And our narrator, in his one moment of glory, took the shot of a lifetime with a clunky old rifle.  
He caught the Warlock right in the eye and dropped him cold from two or three hundred feet. It was then that the Paladin turned, smiled at him and said--_"Ah quitcher granstandin'," Gutbeard says, here and now. "No way in seven Hells could you o' made that shot."  
"Eh," our merry little Narrator replies with a snort. "It was true, ya git. Swear it on ma' squire's shirt."  
"Boys," says Nurse Crone, and that's that.  
Silence reigns for a while. Comfortable and backlit to the music playing from the Deepwater Arc-Box -- an old relic of a music player thrown together by enterprising Mages and Alchemists in the days when Dalaran had an industry to support. After a while, one of the few listeners to the tale dares to ask the obvious question.  
"What did he say?"  
The Narrator smiles.  
"I think," he says, "Thot's entireleh up ta you."


End file.
